Comments
on Walter Benjamin’s Analysis of Capitalism 

“Every
epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow but, in dreaming,
precipitates its awakening” – Walter Benjamin (1935)

Chambi Chachage

Walter
Benjamin’s Paris as the Capital of the 19th Century draws from, and builds on, the Communist
Manifesto. Through the historicizing of the arcades, interiors, exhibitions
and panoramas in the world’s capital of fashion, Paris, he provides a cultural
and literary history of capitalism. Like Marx, he envisions the end(ing) of
capitalism as already contained within its own elements.

For
Benjamin, there is a dialectical struggle between art and technology in the
context of industrial capitalism. This dialectics is clearly illustrated by the
contrasting cases of photographs and portraits. “For
its part”, he observes, “photography greatly extends the sphere of commodity
exchange, from mid-century onward, by flooding the market with countless images
of figures, landscapes, and events which had previously been available either
not at all or only as pictures for individual customers” (p. 6). To resist
commoditization, art and artists focused on artistic perspectives and
aesthetics that photography couldn’t follow. Social movements against commodity
fetishism, as encapsulated in the motto “art for art’s sake”, also appeared.
This, however, didn’t deter the innovative bourgeois society from findings ways
of selling the “fetish”.

For
instance, it used the world exhibition in Paris and fashion to ensure that the
use value of a commodity (and related class struggles) recedes to the background
whilst its exchange value was glorified and globalized across the class divides.
The window-shopper thus became a commodity within the universe of commodities.
In the case of the interior, the use value of the collected things was replaced
with their “connoisseur value.” Judgments of what is valuable and what is new,
irrespective of the amount of labor and the relations of production in the “commodity-producing
society”, became the ways in which the “cult of commodity” reproduces and thus maintains
fetishism.

I
find Benjamin’s analysis of the commodity within the cultural historiography of
capitalism very convincing. For me, it aptly explains why fashion, and its
exhibition, has a strong hold on both the bourgeoisies and the proletariats. Once
a commodity is fetishized, any window-shopping person is alienated from its
labor relations and thus relates to it in terms of the fantasy of buying and
selling  – for a rich bourgeoisie this is
more of a realizable dream whereas for a poor proletariat it is more of a
daydream.

What
Benjamin, like Marx, failed to see, however, due to their Marxian historicism,
is that the revolutionary elements within the bourgeois society would not
necessarily lead to a new epoch. It is not easy to understand why they could
not see this given the fact that they both elucidated the virulent ways in
which those innovative elements adjust and renew themselves in the context of
the cyclic crises of capitalism. It is this deterministic historicism that led
Benjamin to pen this tantalizing, albeit farfetched, prediction: “With the
destabilizing of the market economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the
bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled” (p. 13). More than half a
century since then, Paris arguably remains the world’s capital of aesthetic
monuments of capitalism and, while we have been witnessing a global
destabilizing of the market economy, they are far from crumbling let alone
being in ruins. One only needs to attend world exhibitions, even through
photographic innovations – Internet and Television – to see how fashion
continues to sell, en masse, commodity fetishism.